Reader: I'm always disappointed when a BBQ joint closes

You could hear Jason Sheehan crying back in Philadelphia: The last outpost of Big Papa's BBQ, the place that inspired his "I Believe" essay on barbecue that became a segment on NPR's "This I Believe" series, has closed on East Evans Avenue. Back in 2005, in his review of that Big Papa's location, Sheehan wrote this: "I believe in barbecue. As soul food and comfort food and health food, as a cuisine of both solace and celebration. When I'm feeling good, I want barbecue. And when I'm feeling bad, I just want barbecue more. I believe in barbecue in all its regional derivations, in its ethnic translations, in forms that range from white-tablecloth presentations of cunningly sauced costillas, to Chinese takeout spareribs that stain your fingers red, to the most authentic product of the tar-paper rib shacks in the Deep South."

I fell asleep about a third of the way through reading Jason's essay. I just woke up. Sorry, Jason. We still love you anyway. I'm always disappointed when a BBQ joint closes, being the BBQ fan that I am.

Fans of barbecue, rise up and be counted: When you want good barbecue in metro Denver, where do you go?

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.